For the second week, we’ve had one in class and one online activity.

The in class activity of this week was centered on differential equations. Instead of a usual teacher written on the board/student writing up notes, we experienced a guided way through a sequence of exercises. More precisely we were in two groups of two people and had to solve some problems on the board. After a little while the two groups merged into one. The whole process was guided by the teacher; he was giving hints about the exercises; summed up reflections and work and lead us through a series of problems.

As a participant I found this activity very engaging, I was definitely more active than in a regular class setting. I also have the impression that this interactive setting where the student does, in some sense, most of the work during the lecture and have time to reflect and discuss the questions made me more interested in these questions (in contrast to a lecture where the teacher says here is an interesting question and then solves it right away, or on the contrary never talks about it again and completely leave it to the students).

The general feedback on this activity was really positive. Of course some points could be improved. One such element would be to give a summary of the activity to the students (or ask them to do it themselves) both during the activity to see where we are and at the end in order to wrap up and reinforce was is the central point of the activity. Another point is to be careful about participation, in other words, to have everyone involved and active (something definitely difficult). One question that arose was how many people per group would be an “ideal” number. We felt that 4-5 people would be the maximum but without further evidence of why this number would give “better results”. Another point that seems difficult in such a setting is to encourage peer-teaching within the groups, an element that seems particularly important if the number of team members increases.

The online activity mainly consisted of a reflection on the system set up by the Khan academy, one of the main website for learning mathematics online. After trying “trying out” their online exercises, we reflected on the method’s strengths and weaknesses and then propose possible improvements. Indeed, the Khan academy introduced interesting ways for online learning and for organizing exercises but the level seems definitely too basic compared with the expectations of a first-year calculus course at UBC. Improvements are definitely possible though and I think that with the framework they have, it is definitely possible to set exercises for higher level math.